Interested in the conceptual and economic distinction between manufacturing and cooking, this essay looks at one attempt to encourage the manufacturing of maple sugar in the settler colonial context of the early modern Atlantic world. If cooking is characterized by the transformation of raw materials into more palatable (and safe) food through the application of heat (by boiling, simmering, steaming, poaching, roasting, grilling, frying, or baking, for example), manufacturing might be defined by the deployment of these techniques on a larger scale, one that exceeds the needs of a household for which cooking is done. The labour of cooking in a household is typically undertaken in ways that historically have been marked by social hierarchy (class, race, and gender), age, and physical capacity—as B.W. Higman says, ‘whereas everyone ate, not everyone cooked’. The labour of manufacturing is often similarly marked, but in manufacturing I would suggest that the scale of creation is expanded not only by large numbers of workers, but also industrial technologies, by what Higman calls ‘crop determinism’ (the technological capacity of particular crops to become monocultures), and capitalism, in the production of food to make a profit in the market.